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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   35726 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 9, 2025

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Frankly I don't believe the unemployment rate actually reflects the labor pool in the U.S. A ton of people in the U.S. are not working, or are on disability or some other program that hides their labor.

Also, I disagree that working a farm is a worse job than being a cashier for instance at a gas station. It's demeaning work (I have done many low wage service jobs including gas stations), you are directly aiding people in deep sin (selling lotto ticket to degenerate gamblers and booze to alcoholics) and generally is just bad for your psyche, even from a purely psychological view.

On top of that, as others have pointed out I do believe in the self-correcting nature of markets, I find it ironic that you as an economist don't! If we cut the labor pool, the wages and benefits will rise for these jobs.

Frankly I don't believe the unemployment rate actually reflects the labor pool in the U.S. A ton of people in the U.S. are not working, or are on disability or some other program that hides their labor.

Prime age (25-54) LFPR is close to an all-time high as well. Overall LFPR is down somewhat from its peak in the early 2000s, but that is overwhelmingly driven by longer education (i.e. far more people going to college) and a generally aging population.

If we cut the labor pool, the wages and benefits will rise for these jobs.

What makes you think this?

Supply and demand, baby.

Why do you believe in supply and demand? Sure, it's "basic economics" but economists mostly reject your theories on immigration and trade. If you're going to throw out economics, you might as well go all the way.

why should a proven concept be thrown away?

If you constrain the labor supply in one domain while leaving it free in others, it will tend to enable rent-seeking from raise wages for people working in that domain.

Now, this is a universally true statement that would leave all of society dramatically poorer if applied generally and also negatively impacts the workers being excluded. However, if you're narrowly focused on raising the wages of seasonal farm workers without regard for agricultural productivity or the welfare of people who would have done seasonal farm work it makes a degree of sense.

Supply and demand?

If there are 500 employees who can each do any of 30 jobs, then the employees will need to distinguish themselves from the others in order to get the position. If there are 3 employees who can each do any of the 30 jobs, then the jobs will need to distinguish themselves from the others in order to get an employee. Pay and benefits are excellent ways to do that.

Lump of labor fallacy.

Unless you are saying that there is an exactly 1-1 correspondence between jobs and potential employees, I don’t believe this is accurate. I don’t think you’ve done the work to prove that there would be 500 jobs for 500 employees if there were 30 jobs for 30 employees.

How is it that we didn't run out of jobs decades ago as population increased?

You misunderstand - I’m not claiming that jobs are a fixed number, but I am claiming that they do not track 1-to1 with population change.

To take an absolutely toy example - say 1 farmer can serve a population of up to 50. If you have an initial population of 20, you will have 1 farmer. If you add an additional 25 people to the population, you will still only need a singular farmer. If 5 of the people added are only qualified to do farming, you will have fierce competition for the farming job, as the population can’t support 5 farmers.

What I am saying is happening here is that there is a percentage of the population that is currently employable as manual labour. The manual labour jobs are kept cheap by having this population supplemented by immigrant labour. Removing the immigrant population that is currently taking these roles reduces the number of total jobs, but by less than the number of immigrants removed.

Even were the number of jobs 100% tied to the population (which I dispute, based on the percentage of the population that is NEET), you’d still see a temporary advantage for the workers - jobs are sticky. Picture it like pulling a bucket of pudding out of a bathtub - the area where you pulled out the bucket will temporarily have a void, which slowly gets replenished by the area around it, until the entire tub is back and level. This would give employees in that market tremendous leverage, as they can name their price while the employers are recovering from the shock.

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